Collections

Our Core Document Collections present America’s story
in the words of those who lived it.

When complete, the series will be comprehensive and authoritative, with texts from America’s presidents, labor leaders, farmers, philosophers, industrialists, politicians, workers, explorers, religious leaders, judges, soldiers; its slaveholders and abolitionists; its expansionists and isolationists; its reformers and stand-patters; its strict and broad constructionists; its hard-eyed realists and visionary utopians – all united in their commitment to equality and liberty, yet so often divided by their different understandings of these most fundamental American ideas. To learn more about the scope of the CDC project, please listen to interviews with our collection editors.